


Where Anything Goes

by thetransgirlwhoneverwas



Series: Fictober 2020 [14]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2020-10-15
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:07:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27024784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thetransgirlwhoneverwas/pseuds/thetransgirlwhoneverwas
Summary: The Doctor and Bill are trapped, the TARDIS damaged and no way out. They stand no chance of surviving alone. Thankfully, they're not alone. Together they're stronger; and maybe taking that thought to its illogical conclusion will help them save the day.
Series: Fictober 2020 [14]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1952200
Kudos: 6





	Where Anything Goes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eldritch_reyni](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eldritch_reyni/gifts).
  * Inspired by [i have never reached such heights](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18008768) by [eldritch_reyni](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eldritch_reyni/pseuds/eldritch_reyni). 



The TARDIS fell.

Bill held on to the closest railing she had found when the TARDIS had started to shift, desperately clinging to it to avoid flying off and trying to keep her cool. The Doctor, who was clinging to another railing on the opposite side of the room, was making no such attempt, and was yelling as loud as he could as the TARDIS fell for an incredibly worryingly long time. The TARDIS came to a sudden stop, but before Bill could worry about hitting the floor at a great speed, the entire room turned on its side and she and the Doctor both fell sideways, through a doorway that she wasn’t sure used to be that big and down a long corridor that seemed to be getting longer as they fell.

“Doctor!” she yelled. “Where are we going?”

“I’ve no idea!” he shouted back. “But wherever it is we’re going, we’re going to end up there fairly fast!”

“That’s not helpful!” Bill replied, before she spotted a wall in front of her. A desperate glance around in the few seconds before impact revealed nothing she could do, and she squeezed her eyes shut before she heard a door open. She snapped her eyes open for just a second, just long enough to see a strangely sideways swimming pool before she and the Doctor plunged headfirst into the water.

Their momentum slowed to a halt as they stopped falling, but Bill only had another brief second to thank their luck before the entire structure of the TARDIS shifted sideways again, back to where it was before the fall. The water flowed out of the pool all at once, dragging a very wet and rather cold, but very much alive Doctor and Bill Potts with it.

Bill sat up and tried to ask how they weren’t dead, but her entire body shivered first, and in the time it took, the Doctor answered the question she hadn’t asked yet: “the TARDIS shifted her internal dimensions and directed us towards a rather softer landing than the floor would have been. Thanks, old girl!” he shouted to the ceiling, which seemed to hum and glow slightly in recognition.

They made their way back to the console room through a corridor that seemed significantly longer now that they weren’t falling down it at great velocity. Bill took off her dripping wet jacket and wrapped herself in a towel that she found conveniently placed exactly where she looked for one. She had stopped questioning these things about the TARDIS a while ago.

“So that sucked,” Bill said. “Can we get out of here? I don’t want to do that again.”

“If only it were that simple,” the Doctor replied grimly, holding his wet jacket with one hand and holding a screen with his other.

“Isn’t it that simple though?” Bill asked. “I mean, can’t you just push a button and we’re somewhere else?”

“There’s a reason I brought us here in the first place,” the Doctor explained. “The dimensional proximiser has been on its last legs for a while. I brought us here to get a replacement, but we landed on some unstable ground, and, well, you know what happened next. The fall broke it entirely, it’s not going to work anymore, not even for one trip.”

“Okay,” Bill nodded, still not getting the problem. “So, can we take the TARDIS to get a new dimensional proxy thing?”

“No, we can’t,” the Doctor replied bluntly and Bill frowned. “The dimensional proximiser is the part of the ship that determines where we land.”

“We never know where we’re going to land though,” Bill argued.

“I’ll have you know I’m a very good driver!” the Doctor insisted, and Bill snorted. “But anyway, that’s not what I meant. It’s not about what planet we land on, it’s the device that makes sure we don’t end up landing three miles underground, or at the edge of the atmosphere, or in the heart of a supernova. If I take off, we could end up trapped in the very core of the planet.”

“Couldn’t the TARDIS survive that though?” Bill asked. “I thought you said that the TARDIS was safe from almost anything.”

“You’re not wrong,” the Doctor replied. “But it would happen on every trip. I could do nothing but take off and land over and over again and it could still be decades before we landed somewhere we could actually get out, and even then who knows if we’d be somewhere we could get a new dimensional proximiser.”

“Oh. Right,” Bill said, finally getting the problem.

“We’d need a new one to go anywhere safely,” he said. “And to get a new one we’d have to scale the cliff we just fell down.”

“Okay, so we scale the cliff?” Bill asked. “Surely you’ve got some climbing equipment somewhere in here?”

“We’d have to climb all ten thousand feet we just fell,” the Doctor answered, his expression not getting any less grim.

“Ten thousand feet?”

“Give or take a few,” he replied. “Of sheer cliff face. I might have some climbing equipment that would take us that high, but even then it would take us at least three days to climb that much. There’s no way we could do that safely.”

“Hmm,” Bill thought. “I mean, we’ve got to try, right? We can’t just sit down here and wait forever. We can do that together, right?”

“If we were very lucky, but-” the Doctor stopped. “Wait. Together.”

“Yeah, together,” Bill repeated. “There’s two of us.”

The Doctor tore himself away from the console and ran over to Bill, holding her gently but firmly by the shoulders. “Bill, how much do you trust me?”

“You know I trust you Doctor,” Bill laughed. “The things you’ve shown me-”

“Bill,” the Doctor looked straight into her eyes, his gaze piercing through the surface and right into her core. “Do you trust me?”

He was very serious, more serious than Bill saw very often. She closed her eyes and thought about it, whether she really, truly, absolutely trusted him. She didn’t have to think for very long.

“Yes,” she affirmed. “I absolutely trust you.”

“Excellent!” he said, letting her go and bouncing off towards one of the cabinets on the wall. “I might have a way to get up the cliff after all, but it’s going to be dangerous. But also, potentially very exciting!”

“Okay, if you’ve got jetpacks or something and you’ve been holding out on me,” Bill warned, but the Doctor interrupted.

“No, not jetpacks, something a lot more...well...weird,” he replied, and Bill had absolutely no idea how to take that comment.

“How weird?” she asked, slightly apprehensive.

“Oh, how do I explain this?” the Doctor stopped and thought for a minute. “Okay, so you know you exist on this plane of reality?”

“Yeah,” Bill said slowly. “Do you...not?”

“Oh, I do, I do,” the Doctor reassured. “But I also exist on more planes of reality at the same time. And so do you! Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“You exist on multiple planes of reality, but this is the only one you have a physical presence in, the others you exist more...theoretically,” the Doctor tried to explain, and Bill sort of understood what he was saying. “If I take that theoretical presence into my own physical presence in those realities, then by extension our physical presences in this reality will also come together and we’ll be, well, one person.”

“You’re going to absorb me?” Bill demanded. “Since when were you the Thing From Another World?”

The Doctor turned to her slowly. “Bill,” he said. “I’ve told you that I’m from a different planet several times before. Are you feeling okay? Are you having memory problems? What’s the name of the annoying bald man who keeps shouting at me?”

“No, Doctor,” she tried to get a word in. “I know you’re from a different planet, I’m feeling fine, my memory’s fine, that guy is called Nardole, and The Thing From Another World is a movie about an alien that absorbs people.”

“Oh,” the Doctor stepped back. “Oh, right okay. But to answer your question, no, I’m not going to absorb you, it’s more like a fusion. We’d become one person based on both of us.”

“Okay,” Bill still wasn’t sure. “And this is...temporary, I hope?”

“Absolutely,” the Doctor reassured her again. “It’ll make us much stronger, much faster, that person would probably be able to make that climb and get back down in less than a day, and then we’d separate.”

“Right,” Bill said. “But how does that work?”

“You know how when you pour water into oil?” the Doctor explained. “It’s like that, they come together, they merge, and then they separate.”

“But oil and water only mix for like a second before they separate,” Bill reasoned.

“True,” the Doctor admitted, with a wink. “But when you’re a Time Lord, the actual length of a second is...negotiable.”

“Okay,” Bill said, unsure but with a slightly better understanding of what was going to happen. “Okay, let’s do it. Let’s try fusing, I guess.”

“Excellent!” the Doctor jumped up.

“How do we do it?”

“Well,” the Doctor explained. “We’ve got to be on the same wavelength, both physically in this reality, and psychically. We’ve got to act as one person in two bodies, and then we’ll actually become one body. And then two again later when we’re done.”

“How do we do that?”

“That’s the fun part,” the Doctor winked again. “We dance.”

“Dance?”

“Literally, we dance with each other, and at a certain point when we’re in sync, we fuse,” he said. “Care to choose the music?” he gestured over to where he had stood, where Bill now saw a collection of records and a record player. She pumped her eyebrows in interest and walked over, perusing the collection.

“Am I allowed to choose a song with swear words in it?” she asked, suddenly conscious that she had never heard the Doctor swear. In fact, she hadn’t sworn very often since starting to travel with him either, except for a couple of times. She wondered if it was something to do with the TARDIS. The Doctor was saying something back, but she ignored it as a certain record caught her eye. “Nevermind, got one!”

She slipped it out of the case and put it in the record player, turning the player on. A heavy beat started to play from the speaker.

_Hey hey hey!_

It was the Doctor’s turn to raise his eyebrows. “A rock song? Unconventional, but I can dig it, right?”

Bill rolled her eyes. “Please don’t,” she said as she made her way over to him, and started stomping her foot and pumping her fist in the air as the song got started.

_Sit back from the edge of your seat if you can_   
_Take a minute to remember to breath ‘cause_   
_We’re losing our minds_   
_Where anything goes_

The Doctor matched her movements, and despite his apparent age and grandfatherly demeanour, the heavy punk rock dancing suited him surprisingly well. Bill kept moving, syncing up her movements to the drumbeat and the Doctor followed suit. She eventually realised that they were holding hands as they moved.

_Can we live a real life?_   
_A real life?_   
_And do we even know what that means?_

Bill’s body felt lighter, life she was floating someway off the ground, but she barely noticed. She closed her eyes and let the music dictate her movements.

_Can we live a real life?_   
_And know people outside machines?_

They kept pumping their fist and stomping their feet as they moved around the console room, everything seeming just a bit smaller than it used to.

_Can we live a real life_   
_Between the devil and the digital sea?_

They stopped dancing and opened their eyes, right in front of a mirror. Bill saw the reflection, but it wasn’t her, and it wasn’t the Doctor. It was someone new, at least a couple of feet taller than they used to be, with powerful arms covered in tattoos of multicoloured symbols and Gallifreyan writing that moved and changed colours in the light of the TARDIS. Bill wondered how she knew it was Gallifreyan.

“Because we’re connected,” came a voice from inside her - no, their - head. The Doctor. “For as long as we are, your thoughts are my thoughts, and my knowledge is yours.”

“So you can tell that I definitely find who we are now kinda hot?”

Bill felt rather than saw the Doctor’s grin. “Definitely.”

They looked at themselves again, admiring their eyes which, like their tattoos, appeared to be shifting colours constantly, from green to blue to purple to red and orange and yellow. Their grey hair was pulled lightly back, and when they turned they saw that it was held in a ponytail that reached all the way down their back, each strand of hair fading from light grey to a different colour, until the end of their hair was just as kaleidoscopic as their eyes.

“We’ve got rainbows everywhere,” Bill thought.

“Would you have it any other way?” the Doctor asked, and the new figure shook their head.

“So who are we now?” Bill thought to the Doctor.

“Whoever we feel like we are,” he thought back. “Who do we think we should be?”

“I had a name, but I think it’s a bit too on the nose,” Bill thought, but as she did she changed her mind. It really did encapsulate them, and if he could be the Doctor, why not?

“I agree,” the Doctor thought back. “Not with the one the nose bit, the bit afterwards. So, who are we?”

“The Punk Rocker,” the figure said to the mirror. “Now, let’s make some noise.”

They ducked out of the door and examined the cliff ahead of them. Ten thousand feet of sheer wall. Easy. They ducked back into the TARDIS and rummaged around for a while, eventually finding some rope, a couple of clips to attach the rope to their belt and some climbing spikes, but they weren’t even sure they were going to need them. They did swap out the fingerless leather gloves they were suddenly wearing for some gloves with more grip, however, and threw a warm coat over their comfortable shirt and sleeveless leather jacket. From there, they started to climb. Then they stopped, ran back into the TARDIS to retrieve some money, and then started again to climb.

The Doctor had been right, the climb took the best part of a day, but it was so much faster than they would have been apart.

“This feels amazing,” Bill marveled at how fast they were scaling the cliff, how easily they pushed the climbing spikes into the stone and looped the rope through. “Why don’t you do this more often?”

“It’s technically forbidden by the Time Lords,” the Doctor admitted. “But that’s mostly because they look down on species they consider lesser. Plus, they just can’t help themselves outlawing fun.”

“These Time Lords do have a rather high view of themselves, huh?” Bill thought.

“Why do you think I left?” the Doctor responded.

They were at the top of the cliff sooner than they thought, to the surprise of the rescue team that was waiting for equipment there, trying to find a way to save the stranded travellers who had just appeared in front of them with a jaunty wave and strode off through the fresh snow towards a nearby town. They did get plenty of stares in said town, but they noted with no shortage of satisfaction that the stares were more often in wonder than anything else.

Finding a dimensional proximiser was surprisingly easy, and paying for it was not a problem; the difficult part was convincing the rescue team that they would be perfectly fine climbing down the cliff to their ship. In the end, they managed to make a convincing argument, mostly because none of them wanted to argue with the eight foot tall person with powerful tattooed arms.

The Punk Rocker picked up the rope that they had secured at the top and bottom of the cliff and attached it to the clips on their belt. However, just before they started to climb down, a rush of impulsive energy hit their brain. They took off their coat with the dimensional proximiser still in the pocket, and threw it off the cliff, before leaping off themselves to the shock of the rescue team. They turned in midair, the rope holding in the clips, and planted their feet on the cliff face, catching the rope and coming to a stop. Then, they bent their knees and pushed off from the cliff again, letting the rope run through their hands and falling again until they swung back to the cliff. They abseiled down the whole way, racing their still falling coat, and the whole journey back down took no more than a couple of hours. They finally hit the bottom, detached the rope from their clip, letting it fall to the floor, and held up their hand. The coat and the proximiser fell neatly into it and they strode into the TARDIS.

The Punk Rocker sighed in satisfaction, and felt themselves start to feel lighter and drift apart from itself. They blinked hard, and when Bill opened her eyes again she was standing beside the Doctor, who was holding the dimensional proximiser with a smugly satisfied look on his face.

“Well,” he said. “Wasn’t that fun?”

“That was amazing!” Bill shouted, talking faster than she could think. “We fused, and we got up a cliff, and then we jumped off it, that was amazing, can we do that again sometime?”

“Whoa, whoa, calm down,” the Doctor laughed. “It’s not a technique to be used lightly, and doing it too often can cause, um, problems with people and minds refusing to separate properly. But just once is fine!” he added hastily as Bill’s expression turned concerned. “And who knows, maybe we’ll have to do it again someday.”

“How awful that would be,” Bill fired back, her tone dripping with joyful sarcasm. The Doctor waggled his eyebrows, flipped the dimensional proximiser into the air and caught it again, and strode down a corridor, presumably to install it.

Bill, meanwhile, moved over to the chair by the record player, suddenly aware of how tired she was from the day’s events. She turned the record player on, still the same song they had fused to, but quieter now, and gently sang along.

_A new canon is coming up_   
_And it’s calling on the world_   
_Move fast and out of control_   
_Do anything you want_


End file.
